J. R. R. Tolkien decided to increase the reader's feeling that the story in his 1954–55 book The Lord of the Rings was real, by framing the main text with an elaborate editorial apparatus that extends and comments upon it.
This material, mainly in the book's appendices, effectively includes a fictional editorial figure much like himself who is interested in philology, and who says he is translating a manuscript which has somehow come into his hands, having somehow survived the thousands of years since the Third Age.
Among the steps he took to make its setting, Middle-earth, believable were to develop its geography, history, peoples, genealogies, and unseen background (later published as The Silmarillion) in great detail, complete with editorial commentary in each case.
Christopher Tolkien provided detailed editorial commentary on the development of the stories of the whole legendarium and of The Lord of the Rings as a mass of contradictory drafts in manuscript.
Brljak argues that this framework, with its pseudo-editorial, pseudo-philological, and pseudo-translational aspects, "is both the cornerstone and crowning achievement of Tolkien's mature literary work".
[2] He is best known for his novels about his invented Middle-earth, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and for the posthumously published The Silmarillion which provides a more mythical narrative about earlier ages.
He described in detail how his fictional characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins wrote their memoirs and transmitted them to others, and showed how later in-universe editors annotated the material.
[5][1] Among these elements, Thomas Kullmann writes that the prologue "obviously imitates the non-fictional prose of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnography" with its discussion of how "Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people..." and details of their habitual activities.
"[8] Tolkien commented on this metatextual process in one of his letters, writing that "It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and sub-creation) and Primary Reality".
Brljak argues that this framework "is both the cornerstone and crowning achievement of Tolkien's mature literary work", and that the pseudo-editorial, pseudo-philological, and pseudo-translational apparatus contributes greatly to the effect.
[12][13][14] Verlyn Flieger comments that had either The Lost Road or The Notion Club Papers been finished,[11] we would have had a dream of time-travel through actual history and recorded myth which would have functioned as both introduction and epilogue to Tolkien's own invented mythology.
Christopher Tolkien provided detailed editorial commentary on the development of the stories of the whole legendarium, the Silmarillion writ large, and of The Lord of the Rings as a mass of contradictory drafts in manuscript.
[16][17] In 1984, Christopher Tolkien, reflecting on his construction of the published text of The Silmarillion, wrote the following note, regretting that he had not provided it with a "framework ... within the imagined world" explaining how it might have come into existence in Middle-earth and survived to become the book that the reader sees:[T 7] by its posthumous publication nearly a quarter of a century later the natural order of presentation of the whole 'Matter of Middle-earth' was inverted; and it is certainly debatable whether it was wise to publish in 1977 a version of the primary 'legendarium' standing on its own and claiming, as it were, to be self-explanatory.
[T 7] The scholar Gergely Nagy observes that Tolkien "thought of his works as texts within the fictional world" (his emphasis), and that the overlapping of different and sometimes contradictory accounts was central to his desired effect.
[18] Tolkien's Middle-earth writings had become, in reality and no longer only in fiction, a complex work by different hands edited, annotated, and commented upon over a long period.
[22][25] The films were extremely successful commercially, attracting both existing Tolkien readers and creating a new, younger audience familiar with other media such as video games.
[34] The result was an outpouring of novels, games, fan fiction, and fantasy artwork all based on, imitative of, or reacting against Tolkien: a wider frame created by many hands using a diverse range of media.
Shea states that "Experts in source-criticism now know that The Lord of the Rings is a redaction of sources ranging from The Red Book of Westmarch (W) to Elvish Chronicles (E) to Gondorian records (G) to orally transmitted tales of the Rohirrim (R)", each with "their own agendas", like "the 'Tolkien' (T) and 'Peter Jackson' (PJ) redactors".